


It Starts Somewhere

by astraev



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Childhood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 02:21:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astraev/pseuds/astraev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Knowledge has its dangers, yes, but is the response to be a retreat from knowledge? Or is knowledge to be used as itself a barrier to the dangers it brings?" -- Asimov (Young Topher fic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Starts Somewhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [impactvelocity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/impactvelocity/gifts).



> Pinch hitting for you, I was thinking about your prompt, and thinking about the case of the morals Topher had when dealing with Sierra. I remembered how Adelle said that Topher always took good care of his toys. And then I wondered what he was like as a child -- not killing animals, like sociopaths, but maybe something else? I was really glad you said "origin stories" in your letter, I hope you like it!

Topher was, deep down, terrified by Adelle Dewitt. With his background in psychology he sometimes tried to figure out why that was. He'd had a happy childhood, healthy enough for a child (and adult!) genius, but for some reason he was terrified by Adelle as an authority figure. The words she said when she ordered him to release Sierra to her rapist made him squirm.

_"You have always though of people as playthings. This is not a judgment. You always take very good care of your toys. But you're simply going to have to let this one go." _

He looked at Sierra in the chair, the body of someone he thought of (at least on his birthday) as his very best friend, and he picked up the wedge he meant to use. And maybe for the first time, but not for the last time, he wondered how he had ended up in the Dollhouse.

*

  
Out on the patio of a house in a suburban university town, a small barbecue was roasting burgers to celebrate the end of summer. A boy and his dog were running about the yard, enjoying the last night of freedom before school started the next day.

At five years old, most kids held up their whole hand and bragged about their age, telling everyone they were big boys now. Far from being proud of this fact, Topher Brink was annoyed that they'd made him wait this long to start school. So, even though he was looking forward to it; Topher was a bit grumpy at the prospect. He sat dejectedly on the steps of the patio that led out into the yard, and he threw a tennis ball across the grass.

He looked expectantly at the dog.

Beta, being a puppy, was not very good at fetch. Topher stamped his foot and was discouraged, but then he remembered one of the books on the bookshelf in the living room. He ran inside and pulled it off the shelf -- a dusty tome that described how respondent conditioning worked, the process that had Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell.

"What are you doing?" asked his mom.

"I'm going to condition Beta to fetch," he said.

She laughed. "Well, here," she said. "You'll probably need some treats." She filled Topher's pockets with dog biscuits and gave him a few pointers. "You'll need to be consistent," she said. "If you decide to give him a bone every time she drops the ball, you have to keep doing it until she understands the association. It might take a few days."

"I'm dedicated," said Topher, and his blue eyes shined as he smiled at his mom. She smiled back and hugged him.

By the time Topher went to bed that night, Beta knew the basic fundamentals of fetching. She'd run for the ball, and pick it up. She'd give him the ball if he walked over to her. But she wouldn't walk back to him with the ball.

Topher was pleased with the progress, but a little discouraged. It was okay, he'd figure it out later.

*

  
School was dumb. There were stupid kids all around who were struggling with scissors, and no one wanted to listen to him tell them about the malfunctioning servos on his robot. Okay, so maybe it was only the first day, butTopher didn't seem to think that it would improve from here.

He tugged on the sleeve of the nearest adult, who happened to be the assistant for the kindergarten class. "When will we learn math?"

The woman leaned down to Topher's height, hands on her knees, and said sweetly, "How high can you count, honey?"

Topher rolled his eyes and said just as sweetly back, "By ones, threes, fives, or the Fibonacci sequence?"

The woman's eyes went wide, and her voice lost some of its sweetness. "Can you tell me what the Fibonacci sequence is?"

Topher's face lit up, glad that someone was _finally_ interested in listening to him. "There was a guy in Italy, his name was Leonardo Fibonacci! And he used the sequence to describe the growth of a rabbit population, but my cousin has rabbits and they don't make more babies that fast. It goes 'one, one, two, three, five,' because each new number is the sum of the previous two before it! I can show you the equation, if you want."

"Wow," said the teacher. "It's really impressive that you know that. Did your parents teach you that?" Topher would later think back on this moment and recognize the disbelief, but also recognize the condensation.

"No," said Topher, frowning. "I read it in a book."

"So you can read," said the teacher. "What book did you read it in? Did it have pretty pictures?"

"No, but it did have some interesting diagrams and tables," said Topher. "The name of the book is _The Art of Computer Programming._ I'm going to build a robot to do my bidding!"

The teacher was pulled away, then. With thirty students in the kindergarten class, most of them with underdeveloped gross motor skills,Topher was mostly the least of the teacher's problems. However, the result of his first day of kindergarten was a round of parent-teacher meetings, which Topher was not privy to attend. That drove him nuts, and he kicked things around in his room until he realized that being left alone with a babysitter meant that he could work on teaching Beta how to fetch. 

Looking back on it, Topher didn't blame his parents. They were both PhDs, extremely intelligent, top of their field. They weren't stereotypically absent or uninvolved in his life. They encouraged him to read at three, learn basic math at four, but waited to put him into school until he was five, trying to encourage normal social development. Besides, the public school system had been  more than adequate for their own needs as children. It wasn't that they hadn't noticed that their son was abnormally bright. They had only underestimated it.

*

His parents decided on homeschooling. Which was fine with Topher, for the most part. None of the kids his age seemed smart enough, but his parents were pretty cool. His favorite part of homeschooling was the science projects. One day, his dad came home with a robot kit. It wasn't just any robot kit, but one that was used in computer engineering labs at universities.

"Are you sure this is okay?" asked his mother, fretting as his father laid it all out on the dining room table. The dining room was where home school was set up -- a white board on the wall and everything. "It's age appropriate? Your department head doesn't mind?"

"It's certainly not age appropriate," said Topher's dad. "This is from the lab the undergrads do their senior projects in. But we'll watch him. I want to teach him about programming. And yeah, I promised to return the lab stuff in one piece."

And Topher was allowed to start building a robot to do his bidding.

His dad suggested that Topher build a dog robot, one that could play fetch too, just because it was a pretty neat trick. They put sensors in the robot, programmed it to recognize it's surroundings, and they put a magnet in its mouth so that it could pick up the ball.Topher learned Machine Language, just like he read about in _The Art of Computer Programming_, and he and his dad built a robot that could use radar to find a ball and pick it up with the magnet. It was wicked cool.

A little while after finishing his mechanical dog and successfully testing it, Topher sat with his dad at the table in the dining room. He looked up from his elementary algebra book. He had been thinking. "Beta learned how to play fetch much faster than I built my robot," saidTopher . "But my robot does exactly what I tell it to do. Sometimes Beta won't give the ball back." His dad messed up his hair and nodded, always a good listener, but slightly distracted. "Mechanical things do what I want by building them that way," saidTopher. "Living things learn, but you have to teach them."

"That's true," said his father, looking up from the pile of exams he was grading. "There is a lot of learning with living. Machines don't learn, as much, but Artificial Intelligence is always possible."

But that's not what Topher was thinking. He went up to the white board that his parents had hung in the school room in the house. He drew a blob for a brain and a square for a computer processor, and drew a keyboard attached to the processor. Wouldn't it be cool if he could just program a brain like he could a silicone central processing unit?


End file.
